“Sag’rai!” he heard from behind. He and the young man stepped off to the side.
“Are you our Magomed’s wife’s brother?” asked the kid.
“Yes, Magomed is my brother-in-law. You were over the line, brother!” said Shamil.
The young man paused, then answered, “They’re humiliating the Lezgians. This is no time to play dumb. You’ve heard about the Wall, haven’t you? Magomed is planning to leave for the mountains. Are you going to go with him?”
“Nah,” answered Shamil curtly. “What are you doing here, are you on assignment?”
“Yes. I’m not the only one here from the paper, either. But I’m not going to listen to any more of it. I’m going to go figure out what’s the problem with the mobile network. Almost everyone’s phone is dead.”
Shamil recalled Uncle Alikhan and nodded.
“You go on, I have to head back.”
He held out his hand to the young man, who clasped it in both of his.
Shamil went back over to the crowd. Nothing had changed. The man in the suit jacket was still ranting about the border.
“Well, here’s what I would tell the Russian president. In the nineteenth century the Lezgians legally recognized themselves as Russian citizens. Citizens of Russia, not of Azerbaijan or the Republic of Dagestan. In return Russia undertook the obligation to protect the Lezgians’ legal rights. So then what? The Soviets created the Socialist Republic of Azerbaijan and formally established the Azeri people on Lezgian national territory, and then after the collapse of the USSR the greater part of the Lezgian people and their land was just turned over to independent Azerbaijan! There are a million of us—we are Russian citizens, supposedly under Russia’s protection, and now they’re slaughtering us! Some bureaucrats simply sold us off to the highest bidder! And you know what is going on on the Golden Bridge, don’t you, the amounts of money that are changing hands over there? That money is being made on the blood of the Lezgian people!”
The crowd applauded, and shouts were heard, first isolated, and then louder and louder as more and more people joined in:
“Sadval! Sadval! Sadval!”
The short man in the wine-colored Circassian coat stepped forward again and played another song on the chungur. When the song ended, the crowd resumed its clamoring. Someone gestured toward the city, and the crowd began to bubble and surge in that direction, as though they had been waiting for just this signal.
“Can they be going to the administration building too?” thought Shamil.
“To the Government House! To the Government!” howled the crowd.
Shamil started off behind them, keeping a slight distance. They left the embankment and headed in the direction of the main square. The traffic jams had already dissipated; here and there curious onlookers joined the procession. Women who worked in the food shops and newsstands came out and stood on the street, shading their eyes with their hands and watching the people as they walked by. They marched several blocks, passing throngs of onlookers who had materialized from out of nowhere, then stopped at the corner across from the main square, where the Government House stood. There they began shouting again:
“Sadval! Sadval!”
“It’s closed off,” people on the sidewalks called out. “The cops aren’t letting anyone through—they just kicked out the Kumyks!”
Sure enough, the way to the square was blocked off by a gated barrier and a police cordon. A fat, severe captain came out from the cordon and waved his arms:
“No entry! Stop right there!”
“What’s going on?” asked a dark-faced man, the one who had given the speech on the embankment.
Only scraps reached Shamil’s ears: “An urgent meeting in there…orders not to let anyone through…street repair.”
The crowd howled. Shamil felt thirsty again, and decided not to linger. Groping his way through the steamy human labyrinth, he somehow managed to make his way out onto an empty sidewalk. From there he started straight toward home. Behind him, the shouting continued:
“A united Lezgistan! United Lezgistan!”
But Shamil didn’t look back.
6
The glassed-in veranda facing east was a refuge from the morning heat. On the spacious daybed, covered with a long-napped rug, fat Marya Vasilyevna reclined with her legs splayed. Next to her on a low three-legged stool sat her neighbor, hunched over nearly double and guffawing. Shamil silently sipped a bowl of beef bullion, glancing now and then at his mother’s calm face as she bustled around preparing tea. Her composure seemed strange; after all, she herself had said that his sister and brother-in-law had just been by, trying to persuade her to pack up and leave for the mountains, to get as far away as she could from whatever might happen.
“The celebration is going to go on for several days,” Marya Vasilyevna announced. “Everyone who’s anyone is going to be there—people are even coming from other republics. The boy is twenty…they say the girl is from an ordinary family…they met when they were students at Dagestan State University.”
“My Kamilla knows her,” the neighbor interjected enthusiastically. “She’s been invited.”
Marya Vasilyevna was offended. “What, you think they didn’t invite me? I’ve known the Khanmagomedovs for ten years. I used to wipe Bashirchik’s nose with my own hand. I tutored his younger brother for his university entrance exams. They still send me presents. ‘Marya Vasilyevna,’ they say, ‘you saved our lives!’ I’ve ridden in Khanmagomedov’s car many times. You should see their house…oh my God, everything is made of pure gold. The whole place is like a museum. I’ve even spent the night there—the family thinks very highly of me. When Bashir has children, they’ll get them into my class. Right, Patya?”
Shamil’s mother nodded. She was setting out cups.
“That’s one lucky bride,” said the neighbor, undoing her scarf and retying it. “She’s just an ordinary girl. Her name is Elmira—she was in Kamilla’s class. For whatever reason, he took a liking to her. They say he ordered a billboard for her birthday, cost him seven hundred thousand! Her portrait on it, with ‘Happy Birthday.’ It was right in the center of town, next to the department store.”
“You’re right, it was,” Marya Vasilyevna agreed. “But then they took it down. Her parents asked him to.”
“I thought the Khanmagomedovs only married their own people,” Shamil’s mother said, pouring the tea. “The elder daughter married her cousin.”
“That’s right,” Marya Vasilyevna chimed in. “It makes sense. If you have so much money, why share it with strangers?”
Shamil finished his bouillon and stared blankly at the freshly washed windowpanes. Girls’ squeals could be heard outside, and a ball banged against the iron gate.
“What a racket, just listen to those kids. Must be Naida’s daughters from the second floor. It’s high time for them to be inside setting the table, but listen to them running around and squealing out there.”
The neighbor jumped up and hopped around in place, imitating the shameless girls.
“Our math teacher Kurbanova has a daughter like that,” muttered Shamil’s mother. “Some grown man is supposedly paying bribes to get her through her exams…”
The doorbell rang and Shamil’s mother went to open the door.
“So Shamil, when’s your wedding going to be?” asked the neighbor with a smile.
“Should be September, if…”
“Inshallah, inshallah.”
Asya appeared in the doorway and peered into the room. She mumbled a greeting, nodded in the direction of the women, and vanished without looking at Shamil. A rustling noise came from behind the door, and Shamil heard his mother’s voice. Asya reappeared in the passageway. She had dark blue shadows under her large, tired-looking eyes, and the clip in her hair was about to come off. Again without looking at Shamil she sat down at the table, at a loss as to what to do with her hands.
Marya Vasilyevna lurched up off the daybed and waddled to the table, where a
silver-gilt cup of hot, strong tea awaited her. They all gathered around and resumed their conversation. The wedding was scheduled for the next day, and the Khanmagomedovs were going all out. A special landing pad had been built for helicopters to bring in the VIPs. Shamil smirked:
“A fine time they’ve chosen to put on a show, with the world falling apart around us.”
“Things are always falling apart around here,” protested Marya Vasilyevna. “Just look what’s going on at school! Tell him, Patya. If it hadn’t been for me, what would have happened there? I keep things in order. After the renovations there were five buckets of paint left over. I tell Gadzhiev, I say, ‘Get those buckets and take them to my garage. Better they go to a poor schoolteacher than to who knows who.’ So he took them. And he whitewashed my house. So what? I pulled his son out of a pit by the ears. And that boy is…” she rapped the table with her knuckles. “Not a single brain cell to call his own. Dumb as a shepherd.”
Shamil’s mother objected: “He’s good at physics.”
Marya Vasilyevna waggled her hand dismissively. Asya stirred sugar into her tea, clicking the sides of the cup with her spoon. Shamil looked at her neck with its taut veins and asked:
“Why aren’t you saying anything, Asya? How are things?”
She blushed and mumbled, swallowing the words: “All right.”
“Have you gone to the shore yet?”
“No.”
It was boring. Shamil looked at his watch, and at a moment when he saw that the neighbor was preoccupied with Marya Vasilyevna, he asked his mother about his sister’s departure with her husband. His mother had no idea about what was going on and was confused by all the secrecy. She hadn’t seen anything out unusual on TV, and she gave no credence to the rumors about a Wall.
Marya Vasilyevna laughed uproariously, her entire heavy body heaving.
“Have you heard, Patya? That deputy Makhmud keeps one wife on Sedov Street, and another on Titov. Poor things, they live just down the street from each other, and neither of them knows about the other. And just yesterday someone saw him at the Stormy Petrel restaurant with some new pretty young thing. Go figure!”
Asya squealed and leapt up from her chair, staring in horror at her overturned cup of tea.
“Did you get burned?” asked Shamil’s mother anxiously.
“No, no, I’m sorry, I’ll clean it up,” muttered Asya, her face scarlet, slipping out awkwardly from behind the table.
Shamil slid his cup away and left the room. He wanted to go see Madina. They hadn’t spoken for a long time, and recently she even seemed to be avoiding him. But maybe she would agree to go to a café with him. He had invited her several times, but she refused each time, as though afraid of what people might think.
Shamil took out his cellphone and then hurled it onto the sofa. No service. He began fumbling around in his desk drawers, angrily scooping out computer discs, brochures, and postcards with photographs of cars. One brochure was entitled The Meanings of the Koran; another The Criminal Code of the Russian Federation; a third The Art of the Pick Up; the title of a fourth was illegible.
Shamil’s quest led nowhere. He ran out into the corridor to where the landline phone stood on a table. The phone was old-fashioned, the kind with a rotary dial, shiny from use. Poking his finger into the dial, Shamil briskly dialed six numbers, then waited.
“Hello,” said Madina.
“Hi, it’s me, Shamil.”
Silence.
“So I’m calling, how about we go to a café? We can sit and talk, this and that. Are your parents home?”
“No.”
“Shall I come over?”
“Not now—I’m cleaning.”
“When, then. In an hour?”
“All right. See you then.”
She hung up. She had agreed too easily. It was disconcerting. Shamil paced the corridor, feeling the onset of something like hurt, or even scorn. “Any stranger could just call and ask her out like that, and she’d say yes,” he thought.
Asya came out into the hall. She looked at Shamil sheepishly and gave a faint smile.
“Leaving so soon?” he asked brightly.
“Yes,” she answered, but didn’t move.
“Well then, say salam to everyone for me.”
Asya sighed and slipped on her sandals, bracing herself against the wall. His mother came out; Shamil went back into his room.
He lay down on the sofa and let his thoughts wander. He had driven a Lada Priora to the goldsmiths’ settlement. The car was his brother-in-law’s, and Shamil might have been able to borrow it and drive to Madina’s in style. But the timing was wrong, what with the increasing unrest on the streets, and now his sister and brother-in-law were packing to leave for the mountains, and would need the car themselves.
Shamil looked up at the whitewashed ceiling, then at the ram’s horn hanging on the wall with its silver rim and chain, then at the poster of the local soccer team hanging on the wall next to it. His thoughts became jumbled.
He got up, for some reason again shuffled through the pile of disks and brochures on the desk, then let his eyes wander along the bookshelf on the wall above the computer. A thick, well-worn book caught his eye, and he took it down. The cardboard cover had a picture of a small river on it, and green letters against a beige background proclaimed: Rye Does Not Grow in Stone. Must have been one of his sister’s schoolbooks.
Shamil glanced inside the front cover, where there was a stamp from the village school; he noticed the year of publication, which coincidentally was the year of his birth. Something about the number drew him in, and instead of putting the book back on the shelf, he took it to the sofa and opened it at random, close to the beginning.
7
The village rooster crowed hoarsely, greeting the spring. Snow still showed white on the distant peaks, but in the village gardens the lilac was already in bloom, enveloping the winding streets in an intoxicating fragrance.
Marzhana and her girlfriends were coming home from school.
How cheered you would be, reader, at the sight of this merry bouquet of girls, and, most of all, at our Marzhana! A fresh satin pinafore stretched across her ripe young breasts; her long pitch-black braids thumped merrily against her supple legs as she walked; her Komsomol badge gleamed ardently in the spring sunshine! Like fleet-footed chamois, the girls scampered from one stone to the next, from one terrace to the next, and threaded their way through the village’s narrow, winding alleyways with their schoolbooks pressed to their chests. They laughed and exchanged happy glances as they went. So many hopes, so many dreams blazed in the girls’ shining eyes!
“Oi!” said Marzhana. “There goes Kalimat!”
And she nodded toward a pale, haggard figure trudging along, bent almost double under the weight of her water jug.
“Akh, akh,” sighed the girls. “It’s her. Ever since she dropped out and got married, pretty much everything has gone wrong. Poor Kalimat! She spends all her time hauling water and firewood, or sitting locked up at home!”
“Hi, Kalimat,’ Marzhana greeted her compassionately. “How are things?”
“Fine,” answered the unfortunate Kalimat, mournfully.
“Is your husband treating you badly? Do you regret dropping out?”
“What else could I do?” answered Kalimat. “My parents told me to, so I got married.”
“Kalimat, why do you go around in those long scarfs and chokhto? Just tie on a cotton kerchief, or, even better, let your braids wave free in the breeze!”
“I can’t,” sighed Kalimat and plodded onward on her dreary way to her dismal home.
Silent and gloomy was the village. Its huts cringed together like starving children. Darkest despotism, cruelty, and misfortune wafted from its old towers, ancient mosques and madrasas. Only with difficulty did the sun’s rays penetrate the fissures in the stone doorways, feeling their way along the village’s zigzagging rises and slopes. But youth shone through the girls’ eyelashes. Instead of s
hapeless silk dresses and baggy shalwar trousers, instead of chokhto left over from the old regime, they sported short school dresses, and instead of soft leather chuviaks, chic factory-made shoes glistened on their feet.
Now Marzhana was home. She said good-bye to her friends and flitted into the saklya. Her mother pounced.
“Where have you been? Your father has been asking about you all afternoon. He wants to arrange a marriage for you to Nasyr.”
Tears glistened in Marzhana’s blue eyes.
Shamil flipped through several pages, glanced at his wristwatch, and resumed his reading.
How long had the mountains gone without rain! Driver Mukhtar slammed his tractor’s door with a confident thud and looked down the cascade of narrow terraces to the foothills, so far down that the mountain river’s meager channel could barely be seen between the banks. The stream’s gentle curving bends reminded him somehow of Marzhana…
Shamil skipped several paragraphs.
A crowd of men, having donned black burkas, set off in a ramshackle procession around the village, brandishing the sacred rags that the first Islamic missionaries had supposedly been wearing when they arrived in the village. In the lead walked the elders; next came the younger men; in the rear trotted the boys, who had been taught to chant the prayers obediently and keep their heads bowed. Nasyr’s father Ali chanted the verses with great energy, jutting his shaggy reddish beard forward. This was the same pious Ali who, they said, had secreted away who knows how many sahks of flour from the kolkhoz!
“What’s going on here?” shouted Gadzhi, the kolkhoz chairman. “Back to work, everyone! Reprimands for one and all! There’s no rain; what’s the point of asking Allah for it?”
But the villagers had lost all sense of reason. After noon only a few dozen people were left in the village. The women had abandoned their plows, shut the unmilked cows in their barns, and rushed to the top of the craggy cliff, which loomed above the fleeting clouds.
“Mama, don’t go, you’ll be ashamed later,” said Marzhana to her mother, fiddling with her silky braid.
The Mountain and the Wall Page 7